Bad Mommies and Other Omens

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ABSTRACT: Talk story about Lloyd deMause, 63, a psychohistorian. He is expecting a war. His index of leading indicators–editorial cartoons, magazine covers, Op Ed pieces, newspaper headlines–has been telling him that some blowout is right around the corner, and for a while he thought that Haiti might be it. But instead of a proper incursion America opted for Operation Uphold Democracy, which was not precisely what deMause had in mind. “Now that few of our boys will be sacrified, I suspect we will feel depressed again,” he wrote recently. “I wonder if we can find another place to invade in the coming months.” DeMause (whose name is pronounced de-MOSS) is not a warmonger. To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions–you have to agree that there are hidden messages in our leaders' speeches, for instance, and that a nation's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy, Yet deMause's analyses have often been weirdly prescient. Psychohistory asserts that nations have psychologies, just as individuals do. Predicted the defeat of Jimmy Carter, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, He predicted what eventually became the Gulf War. “I don't want to focus on prediction,” he says. “But I do think that a good scientist–if psychohistory is a science–should try to predict. Psychohistory is empirical. It's based on the scientific methods of psychology.” Like certain more prominent historians, deMause thinks that American history runs in cycles–except that deMause's cycles proceed from what he calls Group-Fantasies, his cycle includes Depressions and Manic Periods, but they all begin with what deMause calls an Innovative Period. DeMause says we're back at the Manic Period again and predicts a war–or two wars.